Shortly after recommending that President Joe Biden sign a fiscally irresponsible debt limit deal, the great minds at The New York Times pushed for what even Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has called a “constitutional crisis.”
The New York Times Editorial Board pushed Biden and Congress on Monday to stick to the most recent agreement to raise the debt ceiling ahead of a June 5th deadline. At the same time, The Times joined much of the rest of the leftist media in their ludicrous plot to push Biden to cause a constitutional crisis next time, if not this time.
The Times Editorial Board asked Biden to experiment by using the 14th Amendment to circumvent Congress and unilaterally authorize spending. The Times wrote, “If Congress approves this agreement, the threat of default will be over for the next two years. At that point, Mr. Biden and his legal experts need to follow through on his interest in testing a constitutional solution and try to stop the debt crisis from returning in 2025 or thereafter.”
The 14th Amendment was passed by Congress in 1866 to protect the rights of newly freed slaves after the Civil War. What the 19th Century members of Congress who passed this amendment did not write, The Times and the rest of the leftist media have sought to test: Whether the judicial branch of government in the United States will allow the 14th Amendment’s debt clause to enable the president to ignore the constitutional separation of powers. Yellen said this strategy “would be a constitutional crisis.”
“There is no way to protect our financial system in our economy, other than Congress doing its job and raising the debt ceiling and enabling us to pay our bills and we should not get to the point where we need to consider whether the president can go on issuing debt,” Yellen acknowledged. “This would be a constitutional crisis.”
While Biden has drawn back from the brink of this constitutional crisis in 2023, it is unclear why any event occurring in 2025 should concern him. Instead, Biden has agreed to a deal with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to raise the debt ceiling.
The Times absurdly chose to misrepresent this debt ceiling deal, referring to it as a “watered-down version of the Republican wish list” produced by “one-sided bargaining.”
As evidence for this ridiculous assertion, The Times noted that McCarthy did not agree to raise taxes or eliminate energy subsidies and lamented that, “Spending on most domestic programs in fiscal year 2024 will stay at about the same level as 2023 and grow by 1 percent in 2025.” The Times also argued that these are “effectively” cuts due to inflation, ignoring how federal spending has exploded since the federal response to COVID-19.
In 2022, the federal government spent $6.3 trillion after spending $6.8 trillion in 2021 and $6.6 trillion in 2020. These years are not a proper baseline but a wild aberration from pre-COVID-19 years, as the federal government spent $4.4 trillion in 2019, $4.1 trillion in 2018, $4.0 trillion in 2017 and $3.9 trillion in 2016.
The article also noted that Republicans sought to remove $80 billion in new funding from the IRS. The Times claimed, “Mr. Biden agreed to reduce the new I.R.S. spending by about $21 billion over two years, though the money may be moved to the general fund to reduce the impact of the new spending caps.” In 2023, a paltry $1.4 billion will be cut.
Giving $80 billion to a federal agency known to harass conservatives to hire 87,000 agents is a non-starter for many conservatives. Barely reducing the amount is hardly a conservative victory and certainly not a win for middle-class Americans.
Conservatives are under attack! Contact The New York Times at 800-698-4637 and demand it stop covering for career politicians’ wasteful spending that plunges our country deeper into debt!
